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The Rise Of America's Surveillance State
Penguin Press
February 2010
On Sale: February 18, 2010
432 pages
ISBN: 1594202451
EAN: 9781594202452
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Using exclusive access to key government insiders, Shane
Harris chronicles the rise of America's surveillance state
over the past 25 years and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch
terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us. In 1983, Admiral John Poindexter, President Reagan's
National Security Advisor, realized that the U.S. might have
prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut,
if intelligence agencies could have analyzed in real time
the data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured
technical know-how and government funds into his dream--a
system that would sift reams of information for signs of
terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still
captivates Washington. After 9/11, Poindexter returned to government with a
controversial program, called Total Information Awareness,
to detect the next attack. Today it has evolved into a
secretly funded operation that can gather a trove of
personal information on every American and millions of
others worldwide. Despite billions of dollars spent on this
quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future
threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But
the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that
was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered
this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has moved from
the province of right-wing technocrats into the mainstream,
becoming a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on
terror. Harris puts us behind the scenes where
twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness
Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get
government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties.
We see an Army major agonize as he carries out an order to
delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror
cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before
9/11. We follow National Security Agency Director Mike
Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly
monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the
law. And we see Poindexter return to government with a
seemingly implausible idea: that the authorities can collect
data about citizens and at the same time protect their privacy. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness
program in 2003, we watch as it secretly becomes a "black
program" at the NASA, then engaged in a massive surveillance
of Americans' phone calls and e-mails. When the next crisis
comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil
liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new
dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost
three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing,
unnerving wake-up call.
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